ryan kennedy's blog

Damnit, Chad. There I am, minding my own business. Reading my blogs. Checking some mail. Now I’ve got to go and think about things people don’t know about me. Oh well, mustn’t break the chain letter (this is so a chain letter), so here goes nothing.

1. I went to Space Camp as a kid. I wanted to be an astronaut when I was younger, so when I was in elementary school my mom took me to Florida during spring break and I attended Space Camp. It was cool, I got to build a model rocket (two stage, baby), fly a simulated shuttle mission (got my EVA on) and I shook hands with Alan Shepard. I also saw one of the shuttles flown in on the back of a 747.
2. I was only grounded once as a kid. I took a model rocket engine, strapped it into a vice and ignited it in my garage because I thought it would be cool (it was, of course, awesome). This played well with two of my passions: space stuff and fire. My mom didn’t think it was quite as awesome as I did. Like it’s my fault…I never would have gotten into model rockets if she hadn’t taken me to Space Camp (see #1 above). Of course, it probably didn’t seem awesome to her because the fire end of the engine was pointing at the gas water heater. Seriously, what’s the worst that could have happened?
3. Some people know this already, so file this under something you probably didn’t know about me. I drank liquid nitrogen in college. No, that’s not a name of an alcoholic beverage. I was a chemistry major for about 2 years. During that time, I was a teacher’s assistant in a special lab. That lab afforded me the opportunity to get my hands on some liquid nitrogen. Well, when you’ve got super cool liquid at your disposal, what do you do with it? In my case, I turn on a video camera and video tape it. I assure you, I didn’t freeze my mouth or any other part of my body (although I did spit out icy bits of saliva a couple of times). I never actually swallowed the liquid (for an explanation of why not to do that, read this). I poured it into my mouth and let it sit there a moment or two before expelling the gaseous nitrogen, making it look like white smoke was pouring out of my mouth. I don’t have the video, if anyone at Cal Poly happens to have it (I’m not certain all of the teachers were amused), I’d love to get a copy. Anyway, for an explanation of why this didn’t freeze/kill me, read up on the Leidenfrost Effect. The short version is that the temperature difference is so great that the liquid next to the skin instantly vaporizes, forming a thin layer of nitrogen gas between my skin and the liquid. Gas isn’t a good conductor of heat, so the liquid wasn’t able to easily extract heat from my skin. I had a teacher in college who actually swallowed the stuff. He’s lucky he isn’t dead, but it did make for one amazing burp (it was so long, I swear he was about to black out). There’s a video of some teacher drinking liquid nitrogen on You Tube, but it’s terrible. Gives you the gist of it, though.
4. I crank paged my college roommate with his ex-girlfriend’s phone number while he was drunk. He was annoying me, so I slipped away and found his address book and looked up her number. I went back to where everyone was sitting, hid the phone behind my back and dialed (I wanted to be in the room with him so he wouldn’t suspect me). They hadn’t been on good terms since the breakup, so I was hoping a late night, drunk call from him would be worth a lot of amusement. He didn’t recognize the number when he got the page, which was basically the best case scenario. That way he wasn’t going to be able to back out once he knew who it was. So he calls her. He ends up taking the phone outside and talks to her for like an hour. I didn’t get the fireworks I wanted, but I did get him out of the room. Good times.
5. In my senior year of high school, I was beaten out during varsity baseball tryouts by a future #1 Major League Baseball draft pick (Pat Burrell). He got the position, but I got the last laugh. I’m now an engineer with Yahoo! Mail and all he’s got is his 6 year, $50M contract. Yeah buddy, see you at the next reunion. We’ll swap stories. I’ll tell you about that last, nasty bug I fixed in Yahoo! Mail and you can tell me how much your bobblehead is selling for on eBay. And make sure your Ferrari doesn’t leave any door dings on my Toyota.

Well, now you know everything.

As I wind down my second month of evangelism for Yahoo! Mail Beta, I’m coming to the realization that evangelism is exhausting work. Don’t get me wrong, I’m really enjoying the work. But I think I was deluding myself when I said I could spare an hour a day to work on it. I wasn’t deluding myself into thinking I’d have an hour a day available. I’ve definitely been able to make that much time available for evangelism work. I was deluding myself into thinking I’d only do it for an hour a day.

I spent the better part of this week building my most recent post to the ymailupdates.com blog. It started with getting a dump of the code changes from source control. I can’t get into the details, but suffice it to say the dump was gi-normous. I then went change by change, building up a macro-picture of what those micro-changes meant. Once I had my list, it was time to start writing the post. I had to figure out what types of updates I was dealing with. I had some bug fixes, some new features, some performance enhancements and so on. From there I started building a framework for the post. It’s difficult to talk about certain things and have them make sense, so I also had to get some screen shots. Once I had those, they had to be fitted into the document so they didn’t look silly (something I’m not 100% certain I was successful in, but I tried).

Once the post is done, I had to (of course) read over it a billion times proof reading for typos, checking that everything made sense and looking to see if anything I wrote sounded odd (I have a tendency, at times, to use words multiple times in the same sentence, making for a strange reading experience). Then I post it and reload the blog in my browser to make sure the update took, being sure to test with both Firefox and Internet Explorer. So, I’m done at that point…right?

No, not so much. The ymailupdates.com blog isn’t hugely visible yet. We’ve been posting to it without doing a lot of promotion for it, so whatever readership we have right now is purely word of mouth. That means getting the word out. So I link to it from my personal blog because people used to come there first for news regarding Yahoo! Mail Beta updates. Then I post to the Y-Mail Group because that set of users loves being the first to hear when we do anything new. Then, I do something I haven’t done before. I put the word out to other bloggers. I take a list of bloggers who have talked about Yahoo! Mail Beta in the past and let them know that we’ve pushed out a new update. Perhaps that will help to generate a little more buzz for us since their readership is far larger and more diverse.

So is that all I do, blogging? If only. I sift through a bunch of mail every day. Most of it comes from the Y-Mail group but I also get a decent amount that’s sent directly to me by the users. I imagine many engineers would mind being contacted directly like that, I don’t. That’s why I haven’t been afraid to put my email address into past posts (something David Utter thinks I did on accident). Anyway, I try to respond to everything, although I can’t get to all of it immediately.

Once I’ve finished all that, I have to keep an eye on what everybody else is saying about us. I have several trackers set up with Technorati and Yahoo! News Search. Those are fairly noisy channels, so I really have to scan them carefully to pick out the useful nuggets. Depending on what I find, I may submit a comment to a particular post. Depends on whether or not I feel like I can be of use. Sometimes I post just to say, “hey, Yahoo! hears you.” It’s amazing to see the reactions of people when I submit comments. Particularly when their posts are harsh. It’s amazing what people will say about you if they think you aren’t listening.

So I’m formally committed to 5 hours per week of this. I’d say I easily exceed that by 2-3x in a given week. But that’s okay, I don’t do it because I have to. I do it because I enjoy it. I don’t think you can be a good evangelist unless you enjoy it. But now I can see why someone like Robert Scoble made it their full-time job (back when he was doing it for Microsoft).